1. Technical Field
This invention relates to decorative shutters for buildings such as commercial and residential dwellings, and more particularly to a component shutter apparatus which is secured together by ultrasonic welding techniques.
2. Discussion
Decorative shutters are used in a wide-variety of applications to provide an aesthetically pleasing appearance to buildings such as commercial and residential dwellings. Such shutters are typically placed on both sides of a window or a group of windows. Until recently, such shutters were typically made from wood, which necessitated periodic scrapping, priming and painting to maintain the attractive appearance of such shutters.
More recently, such shutters have been formed from a combination of injection molded component parts molded from high-strength plastics. Such component shutters have usually incorporated a pair of elongated side members and one or more louvers, spacers, and/or solid panels positioned between the side members. The various louvers, spacer panels, and/or solid panels have typically been secured to the side members via staples or some other form of mechanical, external fastening element. As will be appreciated, the use of external fastening elements to secure the various component parts of a component shutter assembly rigidly together introduces added costs due to the external fastening elements themselves, as well as frequently increasing the overall cost of manufacturing. Furthermore, if during assembly of the component shutter a mistake is made, the component parts involved cannot simply be discarded into a scrap bin for re-use due to the presence of the staples or other like metal fastening elements. Such elements must be removed from the scrap pieces before the scrap pieces may be re-used and molded into new component parts. This step alone introduces significant added manual labor to make sure that the staples or other like fastening members are removed from scrap materials before the scrap materials are further re-processed through typical molding techniques into new component shutter pieces.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a component shutter apparatus which may be assembled quickly and easily without the use of external fastening elements such as staples, threaded screws or the like. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a component shutter apparatus and method of assembling same in which the individual component parts of the shutter apparatus are secured together solely by ultrasonic welding. In this manner, the need for any external fastening elements such as staples, threaded screws or the like is eliminated. Such a component shutter apparatus would also significantly ease the manner in which scrap individual component parts may be re-used since the manual step of removing the staples or other like external fastening elements prior to reusing the scrap component parts would be eliminated.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a component shutter apparatus and method of assembling same in which the various component parts may be quickly and easily assembled by the use of a conventional ultrasonic welder to allow the assembly operation to be carried out by relatively unskilled workers.